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By Jessica Grose
Opinion Writer
According to Gallup, the desire to have children hasn’t changed much over the years that it has polled Americans on the question: In 2023, Gallup reported that of all American adults, 90 percent “either have children, want children or wish they had children,” compared to 94 percent in 2003. Yet the birthrate has declined over that time, not just in the United States but also across the developed world. New data from Pew Research about the potential reasons for the rise in childlessness accompanies a new round of hand-wringing about how Americans don’t seem to want babies anymore.
As the demographer Jennifer Sciubba, the author of “8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death and Migration Shape Our World,” explained to me when I did a series about declining birthrates last year: There’s a pattern that occurs when both incomes and quality of life go up; societies move “from lots of births and lots of deaths to fewer births and longer life expectancies.” In addition, the more educated a population is, the more both men and women tend to delay becoming parents and have fewer children overall — and it’s tough to argue that more education and longer life expectancies are bad things for humanity.
Despite this well-established pattern, there are conservatives who are eager to point the finger of blame at “childless cat ladies,” and not just JD Vance. In an appearance last year on Fox News, the commentator Ashley St. Clair offered this faulty take: Americans without kids “just want to pursue pleasure and drinking all night and going to Beyoncé concerts. It’s this pursuit of self-pleasure in replace of fulfillment and having a family.”
The Atlantic’s Christine Emba has another theory, that the issue holding people back from having kids is a sense of uncertainty “about the value of life and a reason for being.” She continues, “It may be that for many people, absent a clear sense of meaning, the perceived challenges of having children outweigh any subsidy the government might offer.”
Emba also argues that modern mothers with large families buck this trend and........